Homage is paid to 'Funny Games' but rather than subjecting audiences to Hanneke's movie's start-to-finish depravity, this Danish movie, like 'The Invitation' or 'Midsommar' and others in a growing subset of the thriller genre, promises Funny Games' abject horror but keeps it under wraps until a shocking movie-end reveal - tada...they are making human pies...the end, for example - and in this case, the horror reveal comes so rent from anything that has come before, it is two or three days before viewers recognise the sheer stupidity of it - I mean, just try to articulate what exactly the couple with the mute son are in fact doing in the long term - so while something interesting is said about zero tolerance to bad, violent or sick behaviour, one glib line about blunt scissors, a momentarily seen babysitter, a screaming competition on the banks of a sandpit...nothing really adds up to the horror avalanche and rocks thrown at the viewer in the last ten minutes.
★★★☆☆
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